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Lecture

Charge Formation and Delocalization: Solitons and Polymers

In course

MSE-486: Organic electronic materials

This course will introduce students to the field of organic electronic materials. The goal of this course is to discuss the origin of electronic properties in organic materials, charge transport mechanisms, chemical synthesis, materials processing, and dev ...

Description

This lecture covers the formation and delocalization of charges in organic materials, focusing on solitons and polymers. It discusses the Peierls theory, degenerate ground states in poly(acetylene), and the impact of chemical doping on conductivity. The lecture also explores the transition of neutral solitons into positive or negative soliton charge carriers, as well as the theoretical models and experimental evidence supporting charged solitons.

Instructor

Holger Frauenrath

Holger Frauenrath (born in Aachen, Germany) studied chemistry at RWTH Aachen , Germany from 1992 to 1997, with a focus on synthetic organic chemistry. He performed his PhD thesis from 1998 to 2001 in the research group of Prof Hartwig Höcker at RWTH Aachen, working on a project related to the stereospecific polymerization of methacrylates as well as their copolymerization with olefins using zirconocene catalysts. Holger Frauenrath then joined the group of Prof. Sam Stupp at Northwestern University , Evanston, IL, USA, as a postdoctoral fellow supported by a Feodor Lynen fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation . His postdoctoral research projects were centered around the supramolecular self-assembly of rod-coil molecules. Holger Frauenrath returned to Germany in 2003 and started to build his own research group at FU Berlin, funded with an Emmy Noether Grant from the German Science Foundation . In 2005, the research group moved to the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich , Switzerland, where it became a scientifcally independent part of the Polymer Chemistry Group led by Prof. A. Dieter Schlüter . Holger Frauenrath obtained his Habilitation from ETH Zurich in 2009. In 2009, Holger Frauenrath has been appointed as a professor at the Institute of Materials (IMX) of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) , Switzerland, building the new Laboratory of Macromolecular and Organic Materials (LMOM) . In the same year, Holger Frauenrath was received the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Investigator grant.

Official source

Related concepts (32)

Conductive polymer

Conductive polymers or, more precisely, intrinsically conducting polymers (ICPs) are organic polymers that conduct electricity. Such compounds may have metallic conductivity or can be semiconductors. The main advantage of conductive polymers is that they are easy to process, mainly by dispersion. Conductive polymers are generally not thermoplastics, i.e., they are not thermoformable. But, like insulating polymers, they are organic materials. They can offer high electrical conductivity but do not show similar mechanical properties to other commercially available polymers.

Organic electronics

Organic electronics is a field of materials science concerning the design, synthesis, characterization, and application of organic molecules or polymers that show desirable electronic properties such as conductivity. Unlike conventional inorganic conductors and semiconductors, organic electronic materials are constructed from organic (carbon-based) molecules or polymers using synthetic strategies developed in the context of organic chemistry and polymer chemistry.

Molecular electronics

Molecular electronics is the study and application of molecular building blocks for the fabrication of electronic components. It is an interdisciplinary area that spans physics, chemistry, and materials science. The unifying feature is use of molecular building blocks to fabricate electronic components. Due to the prospect of size reduction in electronics offered by molecular-level control of properties, molecular electronics has generated much excitement.

Polymer

A polymer (ˈpɒlᵻmər; Greek poly-, "many" + -mer, "part") is a substance or material consisting of very large molecules called macromolecules, composed of many repeating subunits. Due to their broad spectrum of properties, both synthetic and natural polymers play essential and ubiquitous roles in everyday life. Polymers range from familiar synthetic plastics such as polystyrene to natural biopolymers such as DNA and proteins that are fundamental to biological structure and function.

Organic semiconductor

Organic semiconductors are solids whose building blocks are pi-bonded molecules or polymers made up by carbon and hydrogen atoms and – at times – heteroatoms such as nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen. They exist in the form of molecular crystals or amorphous thin films. In general, they are electrical insulators, but become semiconducting when charges are either injected from appropriate electrodes, upon doping or by photoexcitation. In molecular crystals the energetic separation between the top of the valence band and the bottom conduction band, i.

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